1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cleaning device, a process cartridge and an image forming apparatus. The present invention relates particularly to a cleaning device that has a blade member and a holder for holding the blade member—the blade member being a member for coming into sliding contact with the surface of an image carrier forming thereon a toner image and thereby cleaning toner remaining on the surface of the image carrier—a process cartridge, and an image forming apparatus that are provided with this cleaning device.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional image forming apparatus, such as a printer and a copier, uses various movable components, but there was a problem that these movable components cause vibration by themselves or by coming into sliding contact with each other, thereby causing noise around the image forming apparatus. For this reason, the vibration noise or contact noise caused by the various movable components are reduced using an acoustic material, a sound insulator, a damping material and the like.
For example, the following idea is proposed: in order to reduce the noise generated by the rotation of a drive motor used in the image forming apparatus, a vibration pickup is attached to the drive motor installed within the image forming apparatus, and a noise-erasing space surrounding body with a noise-erasing space is formed to cover around the drive motor including the vibration pickup and seal the noise generated by the drive motor in the noise-erasing space. Then, a noise-erasing speaker for generating a sound in the waveform opposite to the noise waveform of the drive motor is disposed within the noise-erasing space of the noise-erasing space surrounding body, and the noise-erasing speaker is caused to generate the sound in the waveform opposite to the noise waveform of the drive motor, whereby the noise generated by the drive motor can be canceled efficiently (see, for example, Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No H5-142887).
However, in the image forming apparatus, noise is generated from other components besides the drive motor, even from a cleaning device that comes into sliding contact with the surface of an image carrier forming a toner image thereon and thereby cleans toner remaining on the surface of the image carrier. Specifically, there is a problem that stick-slip occurs due to the friction between a blade member of the cleaning device and the image carrier, and vibration caused by this stick-slip becomes the source of causing high-pitched noise from the image carrier. There is also another problem that the vibration is propagated from the blade member of the cleaning device to a unit chassis to generate noise.
It is difficult to sufficiently cancel such noise caused by the stick-slip vibration between the blade member of the cleaning device and the image carrier, even when the noise-erasing speaker described in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No HS-142887 is used. Technologies relating to the present invention are also disclosed in, e.g., Japanese Patent Application No. 2,671,792 and Japanese Patent Application No. 3,097,926.